Siri Hustvedt is fascinated by the brain and mind, and what can go wrong with them. She is also fascinated by fiction, reading, writing, art; she writes with verve, intelligence, and understanding about all these things, and others as well. In her latest collection of essays, she notes the link is her 'abiding curiosity about what it means to be human' (ix), and the reader cannot argue with that conclusion.

In an echo from her previous essay collection, A Plea for Eros, she writes that 'no single theoretical model can contain the complexity of human reality' (x), so her intense interest in Freud and psychoanalysis is a critical one, and interwoven with other interests to form a larger organism.

This book is divided into the three main sections of the title. 'Living' covers memory, emotion, ambiguity, migraine, play, insomnia, language, fathers and mothers. 'Thinking' ranges over some difficult territory, including a more in depth discussion of memory, maintaining perspective, reading, the analyst in fiction, politics and language, and a remembrance of Stig Dagerman. There are also two complex essays in this section: 'Three Emotional Stories'--about memory, imagination, and emotion--and 'Freud's Playground', about the importance of creativity. 'Looking' contains pieces on art and artists, including Gerhard Richter, Kiki Smith, and Goya, and a longer meditation on the meaning of looking at art to finish the collection.

Hustvedt has studied neuroscience and its interconnections with psychiatry, and the sense imbued from these essays is, indeed, one of curiosity on behalf of the author that she transfers to the reader; an infectious enthusiasm for knowledge about the human brain and how it works, and what happens when it doesn't. The author writes much about her own life, and the relationships she has with her parents, husband, and children. I notice some critics complain she is self-indulgent, but this is a common label thrust at those who dare to include their own experience when discussing broader topics. Hustvedt writes so well and so searchingly that using her own life as reference material does not appear as anything other than appropriate and interesting, human and touching, funny and illuminating.

From the first section, there are two essays of particular interest, on migraine and sleep (or lack thereof). In 'My Strange Head: Notes on Migraine', Hustvedt writes of her lifelong affliction with headaches, and she notes their cyclical nature and interlinking with her 'emotional economy': both great joy and great anxiety can send her plummeting. She responds to them by 'capitulation' and goes to bed and meditates (27). Her condition and its origins leads her to wonder about wider aspects of being human, about what migraine means in terms of her identity, and this characteristic of her pieces gives them their depth and humanity.

'Sleeping/Not Sleeping' reveals how little we know, or can conclude, about sleep and insomnia. Hustvedt outlines some of what we do know about how the thalamus is involved in sleep regulation, but also notes that there is no agreement about the purpose of sleep and dreams. She discusses Ernest Harmann's research conclusions, and his belief that 'dreaming is another form of mental activity' (47), and quotes Freud's thoughts about sleep being an 'undressing' of our minds and a laying aside of 'psychical acquisitions', a state 'remarkably close to the situation in which they began life' (48). This leads her onto how children approach sleep, and their fears about entering this strange state without 'Mother and Father', necessitating parental comfort and soothing rituals.

I enjoyed the short and stimulating piece 'Playing, Wild Thoughts, and Novel's Underground' because of the ideas about memory and imagination working together in a playful mode. 'My Father/Myself' is a substantial essay that addresses fatherhood, through the lens of Hustvedt's relationship with her own father, who died in 2004. She also writes about her own identity formation through her relationship with both of her parents: 'If reading was for me the route to legitimate power under the sign of my professor father, it was nevertheless my mother who fed me books, one after another, to stave off a mounting hunger, which at times veered toward the compulsive' (82). She goes on to discuss the influences on both men and women of literature, and concedes that the 'fat mind' she developed and nurtured through reading was 'mostly made of men' (83). However, it is more complicated than that, and Hustvedt recognises this: 'It is too easy to say that the canon is patriarchal, that casting out John Milton for George Sand is a solution to the problem, but that is to ignore quality in the name of parity' (83). Art is not democratic. She continues:

For most of my life, I have felt that reading and writing are precisely the two places in life where I am liberated from the constraints of my sex, where the dance of being the other takes place unhindered, and the free play of identifications allows entrance into a multitude of human experiences. When I am working I feel this extraordinary freedom, my plurality. But I have discovered that out there in the world, "woman writer" is still a brand on a writer's forehead, not easily erased, that being George remains preferable to being Mary Ann. (83)

While I am not sure I agree with her on that last point, I feel that sense of freedom. Of course, remembering the pronouncements of V S Naipaul about women writers gives one pause, but he did receive oodles of opprobrium for his outburst. The important argument she is presenting in this essay is that of the paternal grace given to the daughter, the recognition by him of her achievement being vitally important, both for her own sense of self and for their relationship as father and daughter.

From the second section, 'The Real Story' is a stimulating essay about memoir, or more specifically, the process of recall and the recording of it. 'Memory, like perception,' she says, 'is not passive retrieval but an active and creative process that involves the imagination. We are all always reinventing our pasts, but we are not doing it on purpose' (95). She believes in the emotional truth of what a writer writes, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, and objects to referring to fiction as a form of lying: 'I am measuring the truth of my fictional story against some inner emotional reality that is connected to my memories' (105).

In the third section, Hustvedt takes the reader through many experiences of art and artists, and finishes with 'Embodied Visions: What Does It Mean to Look at a Work of Art?' 'We are the image-makers' (337), she writes, and this is because we have 'the faculty of reflective self-consciousness … we are able to represent ourselves to ourselves and muse about our own beings by becoming objects in our own eyes' (337). Her thinking progresses through her essays, so that the reader can see how she leaps from idea to idea, back again, then forward, illuminating her arguments with examples, not only from her own life, but from literature and art as well.

And here her argument is that looking at art is a form of mirroring, conscious or unconscious. Art is 'useless' in that it is not meant for anything other than looking at and thinking about; it is also an activity that only humans perform. It does not have a utilitarian function, like a chair or a car, but these things can also be 'works of art'. Like Marcel Duchamp's urinal, they can also be turned into art, and never used for their original function again (339). But it is also a 'gift', made for a 'generalized other person', not in a vacuum; there is a spectator. Hustvedt is trying to convey that we view art with our whole bodies, as well as our eyes and minds, and that we relate to art through our whole selves, and see ourselves in it, reflected back. Looking at art becomes a dynamic process in her description.

Not all of the pieces in this collection are as thought-provoking as the examples above, but there are more than eough to make for an absorbing experience that benefits from slow, careful reading.

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